Republican Skulduggery To Sabotage Carter's Reelection Confirmed (after 43 years)

Click here for an article in the New York Times by Ben Barnes, entitled "A Four-Decade Secret: One Man's Story of Sabotaging Carter's Re-election."

Mr. Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility, like some of the characters who fueled previous iterations of the October surprise theory. He was once one of the most prominent figures in Texas, the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and later lieutenant governor. He was such an influential figure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that Mr. Barnes would become president someday.

Barnes claims that in the summer, he and others went on a whirlwind tour of Middle East capitals with Barnes's political mentor, John B. Connally, Jr. The article describes Connally as:

a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.

Carter supporters have long believed that his bid for reelection was sabotaged, but for 43 years it has remained an unsubstantiated rumor. Barnes is saying that the sabotage did in fact take place:

Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

According to Barnes, Connally said:

“‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter,’” Mr. Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sitting there and I heard it and so now it dawns on me, I realize why we’re there.”

Barnes's story is hard to verify after so many years have passed and key players have died. While there have been congressional investigations into the subject, Connally's trip was private and passed under the public's political radar.

Mr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years: Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation; Tom Johnson, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson (no relation) who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN; Larry Temple, a former aide to Mr. Connally and Lyndon Johnson; and H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian.

All four have stated that yes, Barnes did inform them of what the Middle East mission had done. He maintains the trip was done with the knowledge and connivance of the Reagan team, and that Connally met with Reagan's campaign chairman and future CIA director William Casey in an airport lounge immediately on Connally's return to the U.S.

An interesting sidelight is that "The term 'October surprise' was originally used by the Reagan camp to describe its fears that Mr. Carter would manipulate the hostage crisis to effect a release just before the election."

Carter supporters believed and believe to this day that if there had been no interference from the Reagan camp, Carter would have been able to secure the release of the hostages and his reelection would have been assured. 

Why is Barnes coming forward after all these years?

Mr. Barnes said he did not reveal the real story at the time to avoid blowback from his own party. “I don’t want to look like Benedict Arnold to the Democratic Party by participating in this,” he recalled explaining to a friend. The headlines at the time, he imagined, would have been scandalous. “I did not want that to be on my obituary at all.”

But as the years have passed, he said, he has often thought an injustice had been done to Mr. Carter. Discussing the trip now, he indicated, was his way of making amends. “I just want history to reflect that Carter got a little bit of a bad deal about the hostages,” he said. “He didn’t have a fighting chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.”